The Secret Origin of Darkwing Duck
by Aaron D
Summary: Darkwing Duck is one of the greatest comic characters of our age. But where did this quintessential comic book character originate? A look back at the history of the greatest comic hero of our time.
1. Chapter 1

Who is Darkwing Duck?

A rhetorical question, to be sure. The public has known who Darkwing Duck is, at least in concept, for over fifty years. _Darkwing Duck Adventures_ was, and continues to be, the best-selling all-ages comic book of all time, bar none. Its acquisition by Disney in the mid-eighties turned out to be the company's best business decision of the Twentieth Century, which would only be eclipsed by its later acquisition of Marvel Comics in 2009. It was also a bit ironic that Disney bought a comic based around a satirical super-hero, one which ended up being more popular than many comics about straight-up super-heroes.

Still, despite the decades of cartoons, comic strips, TV shows, and merchandising, the most important figure to remember in the history of Darkwing Duck is his creator, Theodore Stein.

Stein was born in Salina, Kansas, in 1927, to a father, Benjamin, an accountant, and a mother Flora, nee Smith, who worked as a seamstress in the community. Ironically, he showed no particular proclivity for art during his years in school, and in fact, flunked the art class he took in his sophomore year of high school. This, however, may have been more due to his grueling evening paper route than to any lack of talent on Stein's part, as time certainly later revealed.

In the summer of 1943, Stein falsified his age on Army records and joined the United States Army Air Corps, where he served in several battles as a gunner against the Luftwaffe. Stein was particularly well known for the mallard duck he painted on each of the three planes upon which he flew. For fear of the German complaint against his father's people, he started referring to his last name as "Stones," even among other Allied troops, despite the fact that his mother's ancestry was not Semitic. After the war, he admitted to his comrades that he was a bit ashamed of this action. He echoed the sentiment in other interviews after his creations had become famous in the mainstream media.

After returning Stateside after the war's end, Stein discovered that he had found a passion: cartooning. While he had little interest in the visual arts prior to the war, Stein had found inspiration in the cartoons of Bill Mauldin and his contemporaries, and set out to make his own mark in the field. He had spent the last two years of the war drawing handmade cartoons on whatever paper had become available. By sheer coincidence, he encountered a salesman for a publisher in Minneapolis on the train home from the East Coast. He was hired as a penciler for Kapow! Comics, and started receiving scripts the next week.

Stein had little creative control over his earliest comics. The assignments ranged from science fiction to horror to romance. Some of the science fiction comics had a noted impact on his later work, at times where he repeatedly attempted to invert the tropes of typical genre fiction (see "Darkwing Duck in the Negaverse," where Darkwing discovers that the Negaverse is, in fact, the original reality, and that he and his St. Canard are merely a twisted reflection, and the constantly recurring "Darkwing Duck Multiverses," where nearly anything is possible, to Darkwing's occasional love interest/antagonist Morgana Macabre, whose appearance and family hearken back to the horror comics of the fifties).

Of course, none of these had as important an impact on Stein's later work as the hero he created himself, at the behest of Kapow!, the Dark-Wing Dirk. Told to create a super-hero to rival Batman, Superman, and the Sub-Mariner, Stein thought back to the heroes of his youth, such as the Shadow and the Crimson Avenger. In keeping with the standards of the time — prior to the Comics Code — the Dark-Wing Dirk sought out criminals in the night…and murdered them. Like his successor, the Dirk wore a double-breasted indigo coat and wide-brimmed fedora, not to mention a blue scarf, which he wore wrapped around his face, to hide his identity.

Unlike Stein's most famous creation, the Dark-Wing Dirk used a real automatic pistol with real bullets, which were often fired directly into villains or thugs in any given issue. Often referring to himself as the "Fear which Wings into the Night,' Dirk's adventures were abruptly shuttered after Kapow! closed its doors. While cartoonists and pencillers at the time were hardly paid any grand royalties in the current era, Stein had spent the last decade boarding in the same house with his widower father, and, having grown sick of the oppressively humid Kansas summers, moved out west with his wife and infant daughter.

Not coincidentally, the family moved to Salinas, California, not merely because of the similarity in name to Salina but also because of the climate, which was far more comfortable year round. It was in this new city that Stein began what would eventually become his signature title…


	2. Chapter 2

In 1952, Theodore Stein moved to Salinas, California, from his hometown of Salina, Kansas, not wholly by coincidence. Buying a house on the western side of town, the cartoonist and his wife settled down in a typical central Californian home. Stein built a separate studio on the corner of his back yard. Fortunately, other than a few windows, no additional ventilation or, due to the town's climate, air conditioning, was needed. He had a modicum of savings. Stein took his time and started drawing sketch after sketch, script after script, until he found what exactly he was looking to create.

And the character he created would be a force in comics. This character wouldn't shake the world, as history would show, but would still be an important, pivotal character. A stalwart hero whose adventures would resonate with generation after generation of comic fans. Yes, in late 1952, Theodore Stein would create Launchpad McQuack,

And not just Launchpad McQuack. Stein sold a script, and with it, an entire two-year run, for his new comic, _Duckbill Adventures_. It featured a bold, adventuresome pilot named Launchpad McQuack, who, in addition to hauling cargo to earn his keep, found himself going on world-spanning adventures, in addition to fighting crime as the occasion may have had it in his home city of St. Canard.

Launchpad's most frequent haunt was the Skyview Diner, located on St. Canard's west coast (One of Stein's most notable creations, as far as _Duckbill Adventures _and geography were concerned, was the state of "Calisota," which somehow combined the traits of California and the Midwest. Stein did not manage to include "Kansas" in the name, as he felt that it would have been too contrived to combine that particular state's name with California). The Skyview was run by Launcpad's on-again, off-again flame, Binky Muddlefoot, a widow whose son, Honker, would also become a fixture in many of Launchpad's future adventures.

_Duckbill Adventures_ also served as Stein's opportunity to explore the medium of comics. Fortunately, due to the popularity of Disney's own Donald Duck comics, Stein found an immediate audience for his work. Again, fortunately, Stein managed to negotiate favorable terms with his then-publisher, Steam Comics, for rights to his creations. Showing remarkable foresight, Stein agreed to waive a substantial portion of his month-to-month pay in order to retain 100% rights to his creations. While this did result in some short-term hardships — Stein's wife, Christine, was forced to secure a job as a school bus driver, in an era when working mothers were mostly unheard of — within a decade, it had proved to be a stroke of genius.

Stein was able to use _Duckbill Adventures_ as his canvas. For a short run, Launchpad went exploring ancient Incan ruins for treasures, while in the next storyline, he would be facing off against a robot who had tried to foil Honker's sixth-grade field trip to the St. Canard Museum, to an undercover mission against the Foreign Organization for World Larceny, to more personal fights against home-grown super-villains like Dr. Reginald Bushroot, who had been imbued with plant-powers by alien invaders. Nothing was too unusual, or too mundane.

And Launchpad was the quintessential epic hero. While none too smart, he portrayed the pluckiness and can-do attitude that was characteristic of the Twentieth Century American protagonist. While he had started out as broad-shouldered, by the early 1960's he was strongly-built as any masked superhero, and more so than some.

Eventually, the experimentation started to weigh upon sales. _Duckbill Adventures_ was never the best-selling of titles in its earliest years, and while it crept upon the top ten of each of the first twelve years of its existence, it never quite cracked it. Steam originally had agreed to keep publishing _Duckbill Adventures_ as it was slightly less expensive than its other titles, particularly due to the fact that its author and penciler required few royalties. By 1963, sales of _Duckbill Adventures_ started dipping noticeably.

Theodore Stein, while not beholden to the market, did, in fact, notice this decline. And he tried his best to respond to it. Noticing the trend of comics in the early 1960's, Stein made an effort to include more super-powered villans in his stories. Villans such as the Liquidiator, who somehow also managed to be a comment on mass-market capitalism at the same time. Bud Flood, a swimming pool salesman, fell into a vat of pool-cleaning chemicals while trying to poison a nearby lake where the St. Canard locals swam in their spare time. Stein, in a remarkable display of clarity, would later re-invent the Liquidiator in the late 1980's as a bottled-water mogul who, in parallel fashion, put a debilitating chemical in St. Canard's drinking water.

Still, despite this forward thinking, Stein's comic did not show a rebound in sales, even considering a change in publishers to Imagine Comics in 1965. Only an abrupt change, one which had been over a decade in the making, would prove to be the change that Stein, and his fans, were looking for…


End file.
